LDL Sponsors
McNair/SROP
Scholars
This summer semester the Language Development & Disorders
Laboratory
(LDL) of the Department Audiology & Speech Sciences served as a
sponsor
site for two McNair/SROP student scholars. Dr. Michael W. Casby,
Professor of Audiology & Speech Sciences, served as research mentor
to the following two scholars: Nora Sailor and Tamika
Lucas.
Ms. Sailor is an Audiology & Speech Sciences student at Michigan
State
University, and Ms. Lucas is a Speech-Language Pathology student at
Southern
University in Louisiana.

McNair/SROP Program
The McNair/SROP Scholars program is a special program of research and
advanced study for achieving students. The program is named for
Dr.
Ronald E. McNair. Dr. McNair was a prestigious physicist who met
an untimely death while serving aboard the USS Challenger Space
Shuttle,
which had a fatal explosion. SROP stands for summer research
opportunity
program.

Scholars work with a faculty mentor in conducting research
over a selected
time period. The Scholars then present their research at local
and
national McNair/SROP meetings.

The program is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, and
is under
the local coordination of Nettavia Curry, Michigan State University,
Office
of Supportive Services.

The Project
The scholars worked with Dr. Casby on a project entitled -- "The
Acoustic
Substance of Morphophonemic Forms." Its purpose was to measure
and
examine the acoustic substance, e.g., duration, of the morphophonemic
form
of is in various linguistic contexts. For example, the
morphophonemic
form of is may function as a copula, or linking, verb as in the
utterance -- "The dock is painted." Or it may function as an
auxiliary,
or helping, verb as in the utterance -- "The Doc is painting."
The
same form also may be part of a noun as in the utterance -- Mr. Dockiz
painted the fence."

It should be noted that the phonemic context of the form is
in
the example utterances is always the same for experimental control
purposes
-- the context only differs by the various linguistic/ morphologic
functions.

The project is of particular interest given that young
children learn
the copula and auxiliary forms later than they might learn a noun form,
and further, children with language impairments have marked difficulty
learning such grammatic forms as the copula and auxiliary is,
without
demonstrating similar difficulty learning nouns.

One hypothesis of this research was that the acoustic
substance of the
form is may be less, or briefer, when produced as a grammatical
verb form than when produced as part of a noun. This shorter
duration
may account for the verb forms' later development by children, as well
as account for the difficulty in learning the grammatical forms by
children
with language impairments.

Preliminary results of the research have indeed showed that
the morphophonemic
form is was of less acoustic duration, and briefer, when
produced
in either the copula or auxiliary verb context, than when produced in
the
noun context.

Scholars' Activities
As McNair/SROP scholars, Sailor and Lucas ran subjects by audio taping
them producing experimentally controlled stimuli. They then
transferred
the speech samples to computer for acoustical analysis. Using
computer-generated
acoustic waveforms of the speech stimuli, Sailor and Lucas then made
durational
measurements of the is form in the various linguistic
contexts.
Such durational measurements were made at the level of
milliseconds.
The scholars then entered these data into a database for later
statistical
analyses.

FFW -- FFWFundamental Flaws With -- FastForWord*

In this edition of the LDL Babbler, we discuss the
roundly hyped
and heavily marketed central auditory processing computer-based
language
intervention (cautionary practice) program of FastForWord.
We will take a strong, objective, and critical look at some of the
pertinent
issues regarding this program.

Flawed Research Control

No control group -- The first of the two
peer-reviewed
articles
on FFW reporting significant improvements did not have a control
group. There is no evidence of fundamental research controls in
the
often cited "field research" project with 100s of subjects across
various
developmental disabilities for whom significant improvements are
reported.

Control group improved -- The second of the two
peer-reviewed articles
did have a control group. However, this control group
demonstrated
significant improvements in language performance at post-testing as
well.
Furthermore, the group exposed to the FFW program also had
other
language intervention activities.

Order Effects -- Yet another research design flaw
of
the FFW
research is the lack of control for order effects on a number of
fronts.
The research makes use of a number of different activities or
"games."
Some of these components consist of non-linguistic auditory processing
activities, some consist of non-meaningful linguistic auditory
processing
tasks, and yet others consist of language comprehension
activities.
Once again, control for order effects is lacking across these program
components.
Nor is there a concern for an examination of which component or
combination
of components, and what order of exposure may be effecting any
improvement
in language. Additionally, FFW makes use of five
different
levels of duration- and intensity-altered acoustic stimuli.
Research
control over these different levels of acoustic modification is also
notably
lacking.

Flawed Measurement

The use of AEs -- The FFW research has
routinely used age-equivalence
scores (AEs) when reporting improvements. A major difficulty with
AEs is that for many tests an increase of a very few points may make an
apparent 1 to 2 year gain vis-à-vis age equivalence. Such
small point changes however will not result in large gains when
evaluated
against psychometrically-sounder evaluation schemes such as utilization
of standard scores or means and standard deviations.

SEMs -- In reporting increases on standardized
tests
the FFW
research often fails to report or only partially reports standard error
of measurement (SEM) data from their repeated testing of
subjects.
SEM data are of great importance in the evaluation of the effects of
repeated
testing and potential regression to the mean.

Flawed Reporting of Improvement in Language
Usage
The research on the the effectiveness of FFW has not routinely
examined the participants' actual language for communication use in
pre-
or post-testing. There are no controlled data to demonstrated gains in
the functional-pragmatic usage of language of children after they have
completed the intervention program.

Teaching to the Test
One of the most disconcerting aspects of the FFW research is
that many of the activities of the program are "teaching the tests", or
most certainly "teaching to the tests", that are used in post-testing
to
document behavior change. For example the "Block Commander"
activity
closely resembles the Token Test for Children, and the "Language
Comprehension
Builder" training activity is closely based on the Curtiss and Yamada
language
comprehension test, as well as resembling numerous other tests of
receptive
language. Both of these instruments are often used in the
post-testing
of the participants. The training activity of "Circus Sequence" closely
resembles the auditory temporal resolution test used in post-testing.

Similar Levels of Improvement are Found
Across Other
Intervention Strategies
In general the FFW research reports an average gain of
approximately
1 standard deviation improvement in participants' assessed language
performance
at the conclusion of the training. When we look at the broader
field
of speech-language pathology and language intervention with young
children,
this level of improvement is not that uniquely remarkable.
That level of improvement is a fairly standard effect of most reported
research on the effectiveness of many different language intervention
approaches.
Meta-analyses of the efficacy of language intervention for young
children
have reported an effect size of approximately 1 standard deviation
improvement.

Children Make Short-Term Gains on Auditory
Temporal
Resolution Tasks Without Intervention
Other research has demonstrated that young children make significant
gains in their performance on auditory temporal resolution tasks -- so
critical and core to the FFW approach -- within a limited
exposure
and familiarity time. This calls into question the significance
of
the core auditory temporal resolution impairment. If such
deficits
were so significant and core to children's language learning, then it
is
doubtful that such limited exposure and familiarity would lead to
significant
improvements in performance. This other research also is
demonstrative
of the lack of a need for a long and intensive period of training to
gain
improved performance on auditory temporal resolution tasks.

FFW Acoustic Modification of Natural
Speech
Makes it Unintelligible
Recent research in the Language Development & Disorders Lab, of
the Department of Audiology & Speech Sciences, Michigan State
University
has demonstrated that the early levels (i.e., 1-3) of the 5 levels of
acoustic
modification of speech found in FFW are essentially
unintelligible
to listeners. It is counter intuitive to think that distorted and
unintelligible speech stimuli could lead to language gains in young
children.

Flawed View of Psycholinguistic/Language
Processing
Numerous other psycholinguistic and speech-language pathology
researchers
have seriously called into question the basic core of the model that FFW
is based upon. One that claims that children with language
impairments
have a specific deficit in the processing of rapidly presented
stimuli.
Or alternatively, that young children who have language impairments
have
great difficulty in the temporal resolution/auditory processing of
rapid
acoustic-phonetic stimuli. Many have challenged these views,
arguing
for a language-phonemic, or auditory linguistic information processing
perspective, versus the primacy of an acoustic-temporal perspective.

In evaluating the demonstrated effectiveness of FastForWord
across
the following points, it is found to be notably lacking as are other central
auditory processing approaches: a) lacking a sound
deductive/rational/logical
basis, b) lacking a sound theoretical basis, c) lacking sound
inductive/empirical
support, d) lacking demonstrations of potential for or actual
improvement
in communication performance, and e) viable and sound alternative
explanations,
interpretations, etc. exist.

* (Editor's note: The phrase FastForWord
and FFW
are registered trade names/marks of Scientific Learning Corporation of
Berkeley CA. Their use here, or any other reference to them or
other
products or rights of Scientific Learning Corporation, is for
educational
purposes. No other purposes are expressed or implied.
References
for cited research are available upon request.)